Wednesday, November 28, 2012

NB of the Week

Thor: God of Thunder #2 - The God Butcher Part 2Written by Jason AaronDrawn by Esad Ribic
Having set up all three time-periods with the first issue, Aaron begins to spread things out a little more, with 99% of this issue being in Thor's youth. Having not been deemed worthy to wield Mjolnir yet, Thor takes his heavy ax Jarnbjorn to go fight some Gods. arriving and only having found "Slavs with spears", he doesn't let his viking men fight yet. Flying down from the sky come the winged steed of Perun the Storm Lord. It has no rider and blood splattered across it. Taking the horse, Thor leaves for the skies, looking for his Gods to fight and giving me my favorite quote from of the series so far,"The clouds drip with blood. Godblood. Immortals have died in these skies today . And it would appear the rain of death has just begun."What he finds up there is the headless body of Chernobog the Black followed by a quick attack by Gorr the Butcher. We then get eight pages of beautiful fighting and a finale of Thor showing Gorr what he's the exact God of (as seen in the side picture). We then get a page of present-day Thor defeating the Hound of Gorr (another badass name) and wanting to finish that which he started long ago. A quick panel of future Thor fighting an army of the Hounds and we're left with young Thor lying beat and motionless is the snow, Gorr nowhere in sight.
Jason Aaron is a vicious writer. His pace is quick and his story is blunt but it's of the absolute most fun. With the first issue being more or less equal story between the three periods, I'm assuming that the next bit will be slowly showing not only Thor's growth as the God of Thunder but Gorr's growth as one of the more ruthless killers he's had to face. The Gorr we see now is cocky and quick and does things himself, almost as though he's still starting. Seeing one Hound in present and an army in the future, his rise must have come covered in death and I'm excited to see it. I actually saw a review at a site I frequent and they gave it a 4/10 and I have to just laugh and wonder what Thor book they read to be so far from the reaction I got from it. I still say this is the best Marvel NOW book that has been put out (I expect that to change one Hickman's Avengers and New Avengers starts up next month).